How to Market and List Open edX Providers

Working Groups Marketing
#1

The Marketing Working Group has been tackling the issue of updating the Open edX Marketplace. This is a significant point of engagement for prospective customers and people/organizations interested in the Open edX platform and Open edX Providers. We want to start by updating the categories used on these pages.

We currently have the following categories:

  • Open edX Service Providers
  • Technology Providers
  • Other Providers

These categories might be confusing to prospective customers and may not fully capture the nature of providers’ services. How would you recommend we change them?

The following ideas have been discussed:

  1. Segment by services provided (e.g. Installation and Development, Hosting, Content Development, etc.)
  2. Shift away from provider-focused terminology and focus more on customer-interests
  3. Utilize the filters or a lead questionnaire to eliminate these categories entirely

How would you recommend adjusting these categories and updating this page?

1 Like
#2

@ayazquraishi +1 to reworking these categories - they are definitely confusing currently, and not just to prospective users. I also can’t really tell what the difference between “service providers” and “technology providers” is meant to be :slight_smile:

Your two first proposals seem right - and imho they are quite close to each other? Customer interests tend to split among the lines of the categories you listed in your first point (though maybe the exact words used could vary):

#3

Awesome points, @antoviaque. I agree that we can segment by service and get away from provider-focused terminology.

One challenge I see is that different providers might be using different terminology for similar services, so we need to be direct and consistent in how we present this info. At least with regards to hosting, I’ve seen “on-premise” and “cloud-based solution” used as industry standards but I am not sure that hosting is the main decision-making criteria for all prospective clients.

A good question to ask as a provider is: what all do you do for Open edX for your clients? For example, at Edly we may say that we:

  • Install/implement and upgrade the preferred Open edX release for clients
  • Integrate third party applications with the client’s Open edX instance
  • Provide Managed Hosting and hosting transfer services for the client’s Open edX instance
  • Provide instructional design, content authoring, and Open edX data migration services

So categorically, we could say that we provide: installation services, integration services, hosting services, and content development services.

Are these accurate to what you provide too? Any thoughts from other providers?

2 Likes
#4

I’m also +1 on reworking the presentation here. We want to be using the language of our customers and reaching to their understanding.

We might even be able to make this slightly interactive. ‘I want to…’ ‘Have my own copy of Open edX to use and customize’, ‘Build a new course from scratch with help from experienced online instructors’, ‘Make a new kind of interactive problem for Open edX’, ‘Customize the look and feel of my Open edX instance’, ‘Create an altogether new learning experience that doesn’t follow the standard structure of a course with units and sections’,

And then each of these might have different further questions until they arrive at a list of providers and a way to reach out to them which contains the information they filled out in the walkthrough.

#5

Yes, an interactive lead form is definitely a great suggestion and it’s being considered. It will likely be easier for providers to list out the services they provide than for customers to try and figure out who to pick. This assumes that every customer would complete the form; if they don’t we could always fall back on the service categories as well.